If you’d like, you can read parts one, two, and three, before reading on.

I always knew that my Grampa Mac was an amazing guy, but I don’t think I realized that he did the very things I have come to respect most: He didn’t settle for jobs that weren’t right for him, and when he had an idea, he ran with it and made it happen.

He was exactly the kind of person I’ve come to admire greatly, and do you think that’s a coincidence? An incredible turn of fate? Or could it be that, growing up hearing stories about him, I simply followed the most natural progression of ideas to hold a philosophy that makes the most sense to me?

My Dad continued his story.

Mac’s manufacturer’s representative idea became real, his furniture showroom flourished, and he was in business as a salesman. And it was around that time when he came upon the book that would be his bible as he progressed through his career: How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.

He stumbled upon it, Dad said, or someone recommended it to him—Dad said he doesn’t know. But however it came into his life, he truly took it to heart. It was one of the things that really helped him; whereas all the salesmen of the day were fast-talking and pushy, Mac was a quiet man, a wonderful listener, and he really, really liked people.

He liked listening to them and hearing their stories. He had a good memory, so he’d always remember who they were. He was never heavy-handed with them, and very shortly after the war was over, Mac was making $60,000 a year.

“And remember,” my Dad said, “that a good salesman then would be doing very well at $5,000 a year.”

“WHOA,” I said.

In fact, Mac was so rolling in money in those years that when it came to buying the house on Long Island that my father grew up in, he didn’t get a mortgage. Mac gave them cash for that house on the spot.

“How did he get to be making $60,000 a year?” I asked.

Here’s what my Dad told me—what he’s been telling me since I was very small: Mac did so well selling furniture that it was not too hard at all to pay back the original 500 he’d gotten from Flo (and her gangster). “We’re talking about the post-war boom,” Dad said, “where America and America’s products and people were really pretty prosperous.” And Mac was great at selling furniture. The moment he started selling to stores, they started buying. The major factories used to complain, my Dad said, because Mac gave them so many orders, they couldn’t make the furniture fast enough to fill them!

Mac became friends with every single small furniture store owner in New York City. “They all knew my father,” Dad said. “People who came from all over—Frenchmen and Jews and Italians and I think I told you this, but he said that very frequently he got so caught up in who they were and liking to talk with them and liking to find out what was going on in their lives, that he’d forget to sell them furniture. He’d say goodbye and he’d walk right out of their store—and they had to pull him back to give him an order! ‘Hey!’ they’d say. ‘Hey, don’t you want me to order some furniture?’”

That was my Grampa Mac.

The beginning of this story, told to me by my Dad, can be found here. The next part is right here.

Mac had already married Mina by the time he hit his thirties, but they hadn’t had my father or my Aunt Joan yet. They were waiting for the Depression to end before having children.

“What was their life like?” I asked. “Were they poor? How hard was it when he’d quit a job?”

My Dad told me: “He would quit a job, come home, tell my Ma, and he’d say, ‘Mina, I just couldn’t do that.’ And she’d say, ‘How much money do you have in your pocket?’ And Dad would say, ‘I think we’re down to the last ten dollars!’ and my Mom would say ‘Good, let’s go to Radio City Music Hall and afterwards we’ll buy a steak!’ And that’s what they did.”

Something would always come up, he explained. Mina had gone to secretarial school, and if one of them wasn’t working the other managed to find something. For a long time, Mina was the secretary for the president of a large medics company in New York—Zodos. She was the secretary for old man Zodos. There was always a little bit of money coming in one way or another, during World War II.

Old man Zodos was not a very nice person, Dad explained. “Except for some reason,” he said, “like the women in that family, my mother was little but fearless.” They were just not afraid of anyone, Dad said. “I don’t know exactly why. They just didn’t have that gene.” So somebody like old man Zodos—very wealthy and intimidating—just did not intimidate Mina at all. “You know how little she was,” Dad recounted.

My grandmother was very little!

One day there was going to be a parade, and Mina told old man Zodos that she was going to take two hours for lunch. She wanted to see Winston Churchill in the parade. Old man Zodos said, “Eh, if you take two hours for lunch, don’t you dare come back here!”

So Mina went out for the parade.

She was standing on the corner, and right as Winston Churchill was going to pass by, the parade stopped. Right at the corner where she was standing!

She looked wide-eyed into the car, and right there was Winston Churchill.

Then the parade started up again.

As you can imagine, Mina felt quite vindicated in terms of her choice to take two hours for lunch and go see the parade. When he was younger, my Dad asked her, “Well Mom, did you lose your job?” And my grandmother said, “Oh now, I didn’t lose my job. I just went back there like nothing happened and when I came in, he just gave me some more work to do.”

The beginning of this story, told to me by my Dad, can be found here.

After his resignation from the New York City Department of Welfare, Mac looked for a whole lot of different jobs. One job he took for awhile was building those ski-ball machines—working in a ski-ball machine factory. Another time, he got on a long employment line at the Brooklyn Navy Yard with his brother-in-law, Aaron. (Aaron was the husband of Esther, Mac’s sister.) Aaron was a very talented and good machinist, but when the interviewer interviewed both of them, Mac got the job.

Mac promptly found out that the job involved working on scaffolds—200 feet up in the air! He took one look at that, and he walked right off the job. It was very hard to get a job then! People were yelling at him, Come back! Come back! And Mac said, “I’m not going up there!”

“How did Grandma Mina feel about Grampa Mac always quitting jobs?” I asked.

“Your Grandma was a very very very sweet woman,” my Dad said, “who simply backed him in anything that he wanted to do. He was just the nicest person, and there was nobody who ever spoke badly about him—ever.”

During World War II, things finally got better; Mac got a job at Republic Aircraft as an inspector. It was his job to inspect the Thunderbolts, check them out and put his seal of approval on them before they were shipped off to the army in the war. He was quite good at it!

When my Dad was younger, he asked Grampa Mac, why didn’t he stay doing that? And Grampa Mac said that at Republic Aircraft there was a big blackboard where they would list statistics, and whenever a plane was shot down it would be listed on that board. Mac just felt too bad, seeing the planes that he’d inspected being shot down by the Germans. He was the inspector, after all. He took that really personally.

Mac’s brother Teddy did very well in the garment business. (Teddy eventually became a millionaire.) So for awhile in his mid-thirties, Mac worked for Teddy and sold clothing. “Do you know who he worked with, who was also selling clothing?” my Dad asked me. “Zeppo Marx,” he answered himself. “One of the Marx Brothers. He’s the one who wasn’t goofy looking,” my Dad explained. “He was always one of the leads in the movies—he was the fourth Marx brother.”

I hadn’t known that.

The real problem, my Dad explained to me, was that the garment industry was controlled by the mafia. Mac didn’t like the unsavory characters, so he quit working for Teddy. So then, once more, he was without a job! But this time he got an idea. He would become a manufacturer’s representative! His idea was to set up a really nice furniture showroom where he could sell lines of furniture to the furniture stores in New York.

There were already manufacturer’s representatives, my Dad explained, but they just took samples of wood and pictures of furniture to their customers. Mac was one of the only representatives who put together a spiffy showroom where store owners could come and actually see the furniture.

Well, Mac wanted to set this up—but he needed 500 dollars to do it! Of course, he didn’t have 500 dollars. But it just so happened that his sister Flo was this really beautiful redhead—just really really striking—and she and Mac were pretty close in age. She was so beautiful that a New York gangster had gotten really stuck on her, fell in love even, and treated her like a princess. For many years they lived on a fancy yacht in the New York Harbor, because this gangster was very rich. (Poor Aunt Flo didn’t live very long, Dad told me, because she had a bad heart from rheumatic fever. She eventually died very young—maybe in her late thirties or early forties.)

In any case, Flo heard that Mac needed 500 dollars, and she said, “No problem! I’ll get it for you.” And she did.

Of course, it was only later that she told him that the gangster had given the money to her to give to him. So Mac got very worried about this particular deal, and he worked very very hard in those early years chiefly so that he could pay off the gangster!

“Did he?” I asked.

“Yeah, he paid off the gangster,” my Dad said. “But what he told me was that, where the gangster was an actual gangster, and had killed people and things like that—when it came to Flo and the family, you would never meet a more polite, generous, warm-hearted, good-natured, compassionate man.”

My Dad told me this story.

What you need to understand about Grampa Mac is that he was always pretty shy, but the man had principles. Growing up in New York City, he always felt compelled to rescue the underdog; he’d frequently jump into fights to rescue smaller kids being picked on, and whathaveyou. (For that reason, he repeatedly got himself punched in the nose. In those days there wasn’t any such thing as a plastic surgeon—so if your nose was broken, you rearranged it on your face so it looked sort of right, and you let it heal. That’s what Mac did.)

Mac’s father was Jewish and had come from Poland. Mac’s father’s name was Sam, and Sam was rather short, but incredibly strong—one might say, preternaturally strong.

Great-Grampa Sam was so strong that he bet somebody 200 dollars that he could lift a horse over his head. “You gotta understand how much 200 dollars was in those days,” my Dad said; “This was 1900 or so, and it was a considerable amount of money!” Sure enough, Sam got under the horse and lifted the horse over his head!

“An adult horse?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Dad said. “Sam came to the United States when he was 12 years old, and he got a job delivering ice and coal to the brownstones in Brooklyn. But the houses had really steep steps going up to them, so he had to climb the steps with the ice and coal—and that combined with the fact that he was Polish got him very, very strong.”

One time someone was beating up Sam’s brother, and Sam went over to a small tree, literally uprooted it with his hands, and started hitting the bully with it. “Not a big oak or anything,” my Dad told me, “but it was a tree.”

It was rather lucky to have a strong dude like Sam in the family, since Sam’s bullied-upon brother later delivered Mac when he was born. You can see how Mac might grow up feeling the protector!

“So anyway,” my Dad said.

Mac was nearly six feet tall. People on the block called him the skinny hero. Mac hardly said anything, but was by all accounts a very, very good listener. That he could do very, very well. And because he was a basically good person, people really trusted him.

Much of Mac’s adult life was spent going through the Depression. (I hear that the Depression is not so much something one “found oneself in” so much as something one “went through”.) In his mid-twenties, Mac needed a job and couldn’t find one—like everyone else!—so he got himself a forged transcript saying that he had a graduate degree in social work from New York University. On the basis of that transcript (and because he was very very decent) he landed a job as a supervisor in the New York City Department of Welfare. He became very good at what he did.

One day an FBI agent showed up looking for him and asking for Mac Morris. The secretary called him and said, “There’s an FBI agent outside who’d like to see you.” Immediately Mac thought, of course, that he’d been busted. They’d found out he’d gotten the job under false pretenses and since the job involved recommendations for the disbursement of large amounts of money, and this was the Depression, Mac assumed (reasonably so!) that if he got caught, he’d go to prison.

“So then what!?” I asked.

“Well,” Dad continued.

Mac immediately retreated to the bathroom. He spent several minutes trying to make up a story that he could tell the FBI agent, something that would keep him from getting thrown in jail! But finally he left the bathroom, and was just about to throw himself on the mercy of the guy—tell him that he was newly married, that he just really, really needed a job, that he was desperate…

But before he could say a thing, the FBI agent put his hand up. “Before you speak,” the FBI agent said, “I want to tell you why I’m here.”

And so the FBI agent proceeded to tell him that they were doing a whole reorganization of the FBI. It was this FBI agent’s job to scrutinize the public agencies to find men who were both honest and exemplary, and offer them jobs as FBI agents.

He then told Mac that he had looked at his record as a supervisor at the New York City Department of Welfare, and found that his work was simply outstanding. And would he like to join the FBI?

Well.

Mac told the FBI agent that he was quite patriotic, and this was certainly an honor. But, he said, he knew an FBI agent had to be in the field… and he was newly married, so… that just wouldn’t be acceptable. Of course.

So the guy thanked him, and Mac said, “If I can ever be of any help to you, please come back.” And the FBI agent left.

That week, Mac resigned from the New York City Department of Welfare. “Never went back,” my Dad said.

Here are some questions and speculations for a Thursday evening.

Has anyone gone around to talk to the homeless in Austin, and published their stories in blog format? Even a limited site or an ebook would be amazing. I’ve looked for this project, certain that someone must have done it before I thought of it, but I’m not finding anything. Pictures, comments, yes—extended interactions and stories, no. How can we help more people without resources communicate with a larger portion of the world? What would they say, if we gave them a stage?

What about the people who aren’t homeless, but still spend time at intersections asking for change? I wonder what stories they’d tell. (Somebody should ask!)

Who are the men who wait outside places like Home Depot for people to come and offer them work for the day? What kind of work are they looking for? Why are they there—and what series of events brought them to that pursuit? What do they do every day? What do they need? What would their perfect job be? What are they best at? What work makes them feel good, and proud?

How can we connect these seekers with work that needs to be done in such a way that all parties benefit? How can we find a solution that serves the community, too?

Why is it that those without the resources to pay for what they need are often so disorganized, or so confused about what they want, that I can’t actually help them? How can I posse up with someone whose primary pastime is helping others to identify the elements of their situation and clarify the next steps that would have the biggest impact on their ability to succeed?

This person should be someone who thinks outside of the box—and someone who often suggests next steps that I am particularly clever with.

How many people could we help then!?

Overviews are too often uninteresting, colorless glossings-over—at least when I write them. It’s a shame, because the only times I feel driven to write an overview are the times I’ve experienced something really worth sharing (and been too long in actually sharing it). But if I’ve experienced something really worth sharing… doesn’t it deserve better than an overview?

My urge to talk about New York has been like that. It made an impression on me. Hell, any one piece of that trip would have made an impression on me, but altogether it was a flood of them. I can’t put that across in an overview. And if I were to write an overview… man, it’d be boring. Worst post of the year. (Worse still, for mistreating what could otherwise be an amazing story. Those freaking buildings!)

I don’t want to give you factoids. I don’t want to outline my itinerary. I want to write something that helps you feel what I felt. Even if your only viable involvement is my retelling, I want you to have an emotional investment that gives you a real experience, not just useful information, but something that resonates. Something that stays with you.

I guess I can’t promise to have that kind of skill, but I’ll sure as hell try.

I want you to understand the way Austin’s downtown city lights take my breath away, so that you can try to grasp why New York’s sheer glitter and spread stopped my heart. Austin is comfy and just-right, and New York is the great growling wilderness. The lights were everywhere. The city grows out, but it also grows up... and up, and up, and up!

I don’t want to impart the whole thing in one mediocre swath. If I have to write the whole experience in tiny vignettes over the course of the next three months, well, fine. I hope that won’t drive you nuts. Because I just can’t stand to do it any other way.

You get it, don’t you?